Phil Hope: First, may I congratulate my hon. Friend, who has been a long-standing champion in the House for people with motor neurone disease? We are monitoring primary care trusts' expenditure of the £286 million for the reason he suggested. The results of that analysis will be shared with the Public Accounts Committee, included in the end-of-life care strategy second annual report, and published on the Department's website. We are making good progress, but we need to make sure that work is happening on the ground.

Stephen O'Brien: I rise to ask a question in light of the Government's admission in the past few weeks that, distressingly, only 30 per cent. of the money earmarked for end-of-life care users has reached patients under the Government's end-of-life care strategy, and that, similarly, dementia sufferers have received only a third of the funding pledged under the Government's dementia strategy-let alone the fact that only one quarter of funding under the carers strategy has been received by those for whom it was intended. On behalf of those who have not received their respite breaks, or, indeed, the dignity they deserve, I ask the Minister when he intends to honour his promise not just to have the money properly audited and reported on, but to make sure it is wrung out of the wasteful bureaucracy and put to front-line use, as promised?

Gillian Merron: I am, of course, disappointed to disappoint the hon. Gentleman. I am sure that he, like me, would pay tribute to organisations such as the Red Cross and the St. John's Ambulance service-of which I myself used to be a member-and to the many first-aiders up and down the country who give their time to provide on-the-spot initial care. However, first aid is not a treatment, as it can involve anything to putting a plaster on to keeping a patient alive until appropriate medical care is given. There is a range of possibilities for people who need treatment: as well as going to A and E, they can consult NHS Direct or visit the many new walk-in centres that the Government have set up. They can also use the extra services provided by pharmacies and out-of-hours doctors, and we are piloting a three-digit number for the future.

Gillian Merron: That is not a culture in the NHS that I recognise. It is important to say that those payments relate to all staff groups-for example, a termination payment made out of compassion, perhaps to a seriously ill urse, could be included in the figures. Another example would be where a payment represents best value for money-for example, if legal advice suggests that a case would be lost at an employment tribunal. Any proposed payment is not permitted to reward failure, dishonesty or inappropriate behaviour. Indeed, such a payment would not be approved. It is worth saying that the Audit Commission also acknowledged extremely rigorous processes that we have in the NHS for approving such payments.

Ann Keen: The criteria were defined to secure safe and sustainable paediatric cardiac surgery services. Southampton University Hospitals NHS trust's outcomes show that it is consistently either at the top or very near the top of all performance tables.

Phil Hope: The hon. Gentleman is chair of the all-party parliamentary group, which has done sterling work under his leadership during the past year to raise the profile of the needs of people with dementia and the need to provide better services for them. I congratulate him and his colleagues from all parties. The audit that I described earlier is designed to track progress in implementation of the strategy's objectives. We will be looking at a whole range of factors, for example the number of dementia leads in hospitals, which is a key part of the strategy, the number of established memory services, and the use of anti-psychotic drugs, another issue that he and I share a concern about and on which we wish to see rapid progress.

Andrew Lansley: Why did the Secretary of State not make an oral statement? Will he now rule out a death tax to pay for the Government's national care service? Yes or no?

Kevin Barron: May I welcome the Government's announcement on setting up a national care commission to look into fair funding of social care in this country? Will one of the remits of the commission be to reach a consensus on this, as recommended by the Health Committee's report on social care published on 12 March?

Phil Hope: We are delighted that we have the White Paper, "Building the National Care Service", which will be landmark in this country's development of services for people in need of care and support, adults with disabilities, and older people. I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the report by the Select Committee, which was a helpful contribution to the debate. I am pleased to say that the national care commission will look at ways in which we can find a fair way to give people a choice about how they make their contribution to ensuring that, in future, care will be free when people need it.

Phil Hope: The extra money that the Government put into primary care trusts for providing respite care and other services is part of £256 million of extra resources being made available not only through PCTs but through work that we are doing nationally. At local level, we are asking every PCT to account for how it is spending money on support for carers, and that will include the PCTs in my hon. Friend's area.

Angela Watkinson: The Government's anti-smoking strategy was successful because it used robust messages designed to change people's behaviour. Does the Minister agree that had a similar attitude been used in the Government' failed teenage pregnancy strategy, the outcomes might have been better?

Mike O'Brien: As far as high-speed rail is concerned, we certainly need to ensure that there is proper local consultation and that local communities' concerns are fully considered in respect of any route. If there are impacts on public provision, as the hon. Gentleman describes, we need also to ensure that alternative provision is in place to ensure that there is no lack of services for local people.

Andy Burnham: I enjoyed immensely my recent visit to the Horton, and I want to pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman and all the local campaigners that I met-indeed, the campaign spans the political divide. I was hugely impressed by what I saw. I know how much the Horton means to people in Banbury, and it is well located close to the M40. I hope that the review of services that has been going on at the Horton is concluded soon and that it can move forward into the future with confidence.

Evan Harris: If the ACMD has advised that mephedrone and other cathinones be regulated as a class B drug, I support that recommendation, but does the Minister believe that he or his colleague the Home Secretary are compliant with the newly published principles for the treatment of independent scientific advice, which the Government published last week? They state that the Government must give adequate consideration time for published advice, but the ACMD report has not even been published and the Government have announced legislation. If the Home Secretary received a verbal report yesterday from the ACMD chair, why was it not available at the same time to the media, since the public have a right to know, and indeed to Members of this House? Further, why was there no statement or written ministerial statement today, and why did it take an urgent question to bring the Minister to the House to make this announcement?
	May I ask whether, beyond classification, the report contains any other recommendations to which the Minister will respond, and when does he intend to respond to them? Given that it was the actions of the Home Secretary that led to the resignation of six of the scientific members of the council-undoubtedly delaying the work of the council and resulting in it not being legally constituted at the time that this advice was given-how can the Minister be certain that the regulations that he is now laying are in order, cannot be challenged and will deal with the problem that we both agree exists?

James Brokenshire: The tragic cases of those who are thought to have died as a consequence of taking mephedrone have highlighted the dangers of the drug. As many as 25 deaths have been linked to it. We welcome yesterday's recommendation by the ACMD that mephedrone should be classified.
	However, the Government need to explain why they reacted so late in the day to the dangers of mephedrone and the connected group of drugs. In a letter to the Home Secretary on 22 December, Professor Les Iversen, the chairman of the ACMD, said:
	"The ACMD explained in a previous letter to you that it has concerns about the apparent prevalence and potential harms of these compounds."
	If the Government's own specialist advisers had concerns months ago, why did not the Home Secretary take action then? Just when did he first know of those concerns?
	The Home Secretary's relationship with the ACMD and the resignations of several members have been highlighted as a cause of delay in dealing with the classification of mephedrone, and previously it was suggested that it would be dealt with in the early part of the year. At the last Home Office questions, the Home Secretary rejected the suggestion that this delayed the process by six months. Just how long was consideration extended as a result of the depleted membership of the ACMD and the Home Secretary's inept handling of the resignation of David Nutt?
	Looking forward, does the Minister agree that it is time to introduce a new, temporary classification, as we propose, to provide a means to respond more quickly to emerging new psychoactive substances while enabling specialist input to be provided? Classification should not be seen in isolation. The Government's drugs advice line, FRANK, was initially slow to provide advice on mephedrone because it was not a controlled substance. What systems have been put in place to address that in the future and more generally, what public health campaigns do the Government envisage having on the classification of mephedrone and the message that because a drug is legal, it does not make it safe?

Mr. Speaker: Order. A lot of colleagues wish to contribute. I am keen to accommodate them, but time is precious. We have an important debate to follow, in which many people wish to take part, so pithy exchanges are the order of the day. I call Mr. Keith Vaz.

David Hanson: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and his Committee for their consideration of these matters. In answer both to him, and to the third point made by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) about a possible pending category, we have considered that possibility, but again we must ensure that we have a legal basis for such a decision, and that it does not ultimately impact on any possible legal use for a particular product that could fall into that pending category. We must also determine whether a pending category would lead to confusion about the use of a particular product awaiting a decision.
	We must examine those issues in the round. We have looked at this issue, we have waited for the decision of the advisory council, and I believe that the decision has been effective. We accepted that verbal decision, and within a couple of hours of receiving it, we acted to place an order before the House. We will publish the report in due course, and I hope that that will satisfy the House as a whole.

David Hanson: As I have said, the purpose of the process is to ensure that we do things legally and as speedily as possible, but also that we do them on medical advice. We will certainly reflect on that, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will examine those issues. The circumstances of the resignation of Professor Nutt-

David Hanson: I have already said that we will look at the pace of activity governing the matter's consideration. The key point is that we needed to take this action based on evidence, and I am sure that the House would have criticised us, had we not done so. Evidence takes time to accumulate, and it needs to be assessed. We also needed to look into the implications of the decision before we took it. We obviously had to look at how we should process the evidence in this case, but I believe that the right decision has been taken, and I hope that the House will support it.

Edward Balls: I cannot do the detail of the shadow Education Secretary's sums for him-nor can Carol Vorderman. However, the overall gap in his budget-£1.8 billion over the course of a Parliament, £1.7 billion to find the savings cuts to contribute to the £6 billion, and, we think, £2 billion to £3 billion to pay for the pupil premium-is more than the entire amount of money from the employers' national insurance rise. The idea that just the rebate to schools would pay for those cuts is unrealistic. There is no way to fund the cuts that education would have to contribute other than by cuts in the numbers of teachers and teaching assistants, bigger class sizes, and cuts to the Sure Start budget.
	If the hon. Member for Surrey Heath were here, we could ask him to answer these questions, but he is not. If he were here, we could have said to him, "Will you guarantee to match us on Sure Start, on schools and on 16 to 19-year-olds"?, but he cannot do that. It is not just that he cannot do it today-at every stage in the Budget debates- [ Interruption. ] I am happy to inform the junior shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands)-I do not know whether he is the shadow Economic Secretary or Financial Secretary; I apologise-about the Budget debates. Last year's Budget debate was opened by me, as well. I think that on that occasion the shadow Education Secretary did turn up, unlike today.

Kenneth Clarke: I shall stop giving way for a time, Madam Deputy Speaker, to help with that.
	That quote was taken from an academic seminar at which I spoke before I was on the Front Bench. There were no doubt considered views of the same kind in my Budgets when I was addressing the same question- [ Interruption. ] The Secretary of State keeps quoting-he has probably got a whole wad of quotes of me and my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), the shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families-but I wish he would take more notice of what we say to him from the Dispatch Box and answer some of our questions. He should certainly take notice of my hon. Friend's education reforms.
	We are committed to recognising marriage in the tax system, and there are many ways of doing that-on which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition will no doubt decide in due course.  [ Laughter. ] I shall go back to the serious question. I have made my point about the debt. I do not object to the House having a good-natured debate about the most grave situations-I am sure that there have been entertaining debates when the nation has gone to war-but the gravity of our economic situation should not be underestimated. The public are about to take part in the general election campaign-or, rather, to listen to it and then vote-and they realise that this is a very big question. They are frustrated by the difficulty of deciding about it.
	The real question is this: are we going to have the present economic and financial crisis resolved by the democratically elected Government of this country, or are we going to have our affairs decided by a collapse in the bond markets and a further collapse in sterling, which is already devalued on a trade-weighted basis by 25 per cent.-the greatest devaluation, I think, since the second world war.
	What frustrates the public looking at the major parties is the fact that although we are all agreed on the dimensions of the problem, the present Government are simply not prepared to face up to them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, not just the Chief Secretary, acknowledged that cuts would have to be deeper and tougher than those under the Thatcher Government. I said that some weeks ago and the Chief Secretary appears to have repeated it. The only person who has difficulty repeating it is the Children Secretary, but it is a fact, not an opinion, that we are going to have to get into some extremely serious spending cuts. Whoever is elected will have to make those cuts.
	If by chance we were to re-elect a Government who did not have a credible plan and who did not have the political will to face up to the problem-if the present Government were re-elected, they would not do so-the process would have to be introduced by the International Monetary Fund. As happened before, we would have conditions imposed on us to restore our solvency in the eyes of the bond markets. That is the background against which the Government are not treating the House or the country properly and against which the Government have failed to produce a Budget that could be rationally debated as an approach to the crisis on the eve of an election.

Kenneth Clarke: No. This is the delay argument. We are supposed to having a debate about whether we should start to act straight away or whether some economic virtue will allow the Government to go on without making any serious adjustments beyond the election and before recovery comes. I do not accept that. It is arguable, but it seems to me quite obvious that the reason why the Government are arguing for delay is that they have decided to fight the election on a rosy and complacent perspective, so the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been instructed not to address the long-term problem in the Budget. We have all seen the Prime Minister being persuaded only with great difficulty and very belatedly to recognise the need for any public spending cuts at all. It is a political tactic, not economic calculation, that is causing the delay.
	The Prime Minister is particularly fond of speaking as though the increased spending and increased borrowing from 2010 to 2011 is some sort of contrived fiscal stimulus or a plan. It is not a plan; it is the fag-end years of the Government in which there has been no proper control of public spending, leading to a mismatch, now reaching £4 of spending for £3 of revenue, which is piling up the deficit. Yet that is described as a fiscal stimulus. We have no policy in place or in operation to stimulate the economy-apart from a scrappage scheme for boilers, which is not going to lift our economy very far. All that we have is a purely political refusal to face up to answering the questions before the election takes place.
	On efficiency savings, there are two elements to consider. Of course we must all make efficiency savings-those on both sides of the Chamber talk about them-and the public are extremely aware of the need to cut wasteful spending. We addressed the national insurance increase and identified areas where we were confident that we could avoid that particular tax increase- [Interruption.] It is no good saying, "Come on, Ken".
	As for the national insurance increase, the moment it was announced I said what I have said throughout-I cannot remember whether I said it first in the House-namely that national insurance was the worst possible tax base for the Government to turn to if they wanted to raise revenue in a recession. It is a tax that should be avoided at a time when a Government are trying to nurture a weak economic recovery. It is not only an income tax on everyone in work, but-more important, in my opinion-a tax on jobs. It stops employers hiring new staff, and discourages them from retaining the staff whom they already have. It also puts pressure on their wage costs. The Federation of Small Businesses estimates that it would probably have cost 57,000 jobs had it been allowed to stand.

Kenneth Clarke: That brings me to my next point. First, there are the efficiency savings, which have been debated a fair amount publicly in the last day or two. Secondly, we will have to move on to a public spending round. We will have to move on to addressing the programmes of individual Departments, and they will be addressed. The education Department is only one of them.
	I shall explain the problem to the Opposition in a moment, but as things stand-as I think has just been conceded-the education Department faces a real-terms cut in its current spending over the next few years. It is also down for £1 billion worth of efficiency savings, but no one can adequately explain where they will come from. No one in most Departments can explain where the pencilled figures for efficiency savings are supposed to come from.

Kenneth Clarke: I do not know whether the Secretary of State does the research for the Prime Minister, who is also very fond of quoting me, but he has just used the same quotation twice.
	As I have just explained, I certainly agree that there should be no tax reductions, or abandoning of tax increases, unless it can be explained how they will be paid for. What I said was what I said, and what has happened since then is this: we have had the reports from Gershon and Reed, and we have settled down and studied them. We have worked out that of their £12 billion savings, £6 billion can certainly be secured. That can pay for what we have proposed. As I have just said, increases in national insurance are particularly disastrous.
	What a responsible Government should have tackled is the public spending programme for the next three years. They should have produced a review of the changes that were needed to address the deficit. That has not been done, and it is extremely difficult for an Opposition to do it. A strange background is provided to the debate by what I consider to have been the most cynical of all the decisions made by the Government in the last 12 months: the deliberate decision to put off a public spending round in the run-up to an election.
	According to the Government's own programme, there was supposed to be a full public spending round. That would have informed everyone's debate, and would have set out priorities properly. The excuse given for its postponement was pathetic: "uncertainty". No one believes that. Everyone knows that it was postponed because the Government did not want to address any of these questions in the run-up to an election. That displays unforgiveable cynicism. We as the Opposition party keep getting pressed by exasperated journalists and members of the public to give details of what cuts we would make, but even when the information available to us is not complicated further by the explanations offered by the Children Secretary, but is set down on paper in English prose, it is not adequate to address that question. Similarly, Secretaries of State need to take advice from within their Department and negotiate with the Chief Secretary and his officials before they can draw up a possible programme. We need to have a public spending round, but this Government suspended that out of cynicism-out of pure electoral opportunism.

Kenneth Clarke: We have set out the five bases Gershon says we should pursue, but we have not allocated figures to individual Departments as we are not in a position to do so. However, the Children Secretary has, for his own reasons, tried to allocate figures, and he has allocated the £11 billion in such a way that nobody in any Department has the first idea of how they are supposed to produce these savings. With the greatest respect to the right hon. Gentleman, I say to him that to suggest that that is an adequate substitute for a public spending round is a pathetic response.
	We should have had a proper Budget. Not only would we then have had a better debate, but it would have been more challenging to both Opposition parties if the Chancellor of the Exchequer-who holds that office despite the Children Secretary's wishes-had been allowed to come to this House and say to us and the Liberals from the Dispatch Box, "These are my tax plans and my spending plans for Departments over the next three years. Which of these tax changes are you going to vote against? Are they tough enough for you? Would you like them to be tougher?" It would have been more challenging to the Opposition parties if he had said on the spending plans for Departments, "How would shadow Ministers for spending Departments on your side of the House react to these plans? Are the Opposition parties going to settle for these plans, or are they going to toughen them up-or weaken them?"
	If that had happened, we would have had a serious debate. The public would have been less disillusioned with politicians as a whole, we would have been put on the spot, and-who knows-we might have done what the then Leader of the Opposition and the then shadow Chancellor, who is the current Prime Minister, did in 1997: we might have said, "We agree with your fiscal policy." We might have said what Blair and the current Prime Minister said then, on the advice of the current Children Secretary: we might have said, as they did after my Budget in 1997, "We accept your spending plans, we accept your tax plans, and we are going to stick to them."
	The Government should have produced a proper Budget, but instead they have not produced any serious fiscal or spending plans. Optimistic growth forecasts, inchoate figures and a complete refusal to hold a public spending round is the only background to the practically content-free statement the Chancellor gave the other day.

Kenneth Clarke: Heaven forfend. I like the tower and I always go there when I am in Blackpool. My party used to go there and I also have fond memories of it as a child. The tower is a national monument and £8 million is no doubt money well spent.  [Interruption.] I am being told that Blackpool has a Conservative council. Indeed it does, but it has two Labour seats, both of which used to be Conservative seats. This is, thus, a mere coincidence. One of my hon. Friends was unkind enough to mention that after a wait of all these years £8 million has gone to Blackpool tower. This is part of the £7 billion that is suddenly being disbursed. Where is the money coming from? It is being borrowed. Is it the Government's money? No, it is the taxpayer's money, which the Government hope that eventually some Chinese investor will help to finance. At the moment, the necessary bonds are presumably being printed by or bought by the Bank of England.  [Interruption.] The only person who Lord Mandelson ever consults on political tactics is the Children Secretary. They are the architects of new Labour, a movement that we all know is, in essence, a media management and party political campaigning organisation.
	Lord Mandelson would, of course, want to know whether or not I oppose each and every one of those grants. it. He knows perfectly well that if I say that I oppose a certain grant, that information will go to the relevant place and people will say, "If you vote Conservative, there will be X million less in Barsetshire." People will say that there will be less of a grant for this or that, so I do not do that. I have a good reason for looking at those grants, some of which-the bigger, more substantial ones-I would probably approve of, but I have no access to the business plan. I am not able to ask any great, international company, "Why are you not able to get this money from your normal sources? Why can't you go to the markets?" I cannot say, "Explain to me why the taxpayer must borrow this money to make a contribution," so I do not oppose the grants. When I used to shadow the old industrial strategy of Wilson and Callaghan, I did not oppose them all because I could never get enough information, but sometimes one could look at the political map and get a pretty good indication of why grants had been so surprisingly successful. It is cynical electioneering and the election must bring it to a satisfactory end.
	That grave problem is not addressed by the Budget, the background to which is appalling. The decline in manufacturing as a proportion of gross domestic product has been faster than at any time in our history. The most worrying manifestation of the crisis is the huge fall in the level of business investment. When business investment goes off a cliff at a faster rate than at any time since records began, which I think was in the 1960s, that tells us how near we are to the end, and, in reality, how likely we are to have growth. That is what happened in the second half of last year, and it tells us we are at risk.
	Labour caused the crisis in the first place. When the Prime Minister was the Chancellor, he contributed to the global crisis. It was not just Wall Street; it was also the City of London. It was a failure not just of regulators in New York, but of the Prime Minister's own regulatory system in London. Everyone outside the Anglo-Saxon world knows that Bush and Brown, when he was Chancellor, were two of the principal architects, by their negligence-two of the principal contributors-to the folly that we all suffered from because of the hubris of bankers.
	The Prime Minister lost control of public sector finances when he was the Chancellor. While he was bound, by his electoral pledge, to follow my policies and my figures until 2000, he was the Iron Chancellor, whose work was based on prudence. If only he had stuck to my rules-balance the Budget over the cycle; no more than 3 per cent. deficit on GDP; and limit debt to GDP ratio to 40 per cent.-all of which were hit and maintained when Labour stuck to my fiscal policy for its first three years of government. Thereafter, it went completely mad and ignored all the warnings.
	The hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) constantly claims that he foresaw the dangers. I think he would agree that when he and I spoke in Budget debates, we used to say the same things about the sea of debt that was piling up and the fact that the level of household debt, let alone Government debt, was unsustainable. We were treated as a couple of Jeremiahs who did not understand the modern economics that the current Prime Minister was taking such credit for. He gave knighthoods to successful bankers; he did not regulate them. And he did not doubt for one moment that he could sustain the whole thing on the basis of what was the most foolish and extraordinary bubble.
	I spent last night reading a very interesting book by Malcolm Balen about the South sea bubble. Although it is not quite so bad, this financial bubble is quite high up the league table. It is worse than the dotcom nonsense we had about 10 years ago, and is absolutely absurd. In this case, I do not believe for one moment that there is the slightest hint in the House of Commons of the corruption that was at the heart of the South sea bubble, but the sheer incompetence and the credulity of the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer we have had in modern times, and the iron control of the new Labour movement that made sure there was no real challenge until the crash came in 2008, is, to a certain extent, reminiscent of past financial scandals. The outcome should be that the Government pay the penalty. They have caused and contributed to the crisis and they currently have no answer to precisely how they will get us out of debt and deficit. They cannot seriously offer themselves for re-election.
	It appears that most former Cabinet Ministers are planning their future careers in various branches of private enterprise. Where legitimate, I wish them success in the private sector phase of their careers, although one or two have been going near the wind when it comes to what they are contemplating.
	I very much hope that most of them are thinking about what they can take up as an alternative to Government for the next few years, as the British economy cannot possibly stand their return. This hopelessly inadequate Budget is the last sad epitaph on a history of failure.

Vincent Cable: I too came along this afternoon under the impression that this was to be an economic debate. I am pleased to see that the first detachment of cavalry from the Treasury has arrived, and maybe there are others to come.
	As this is the end of the Budget debate, many of the arguments have been aired already, either in the Chamber or outside. One useful aspect of coming in at the end of the debate is that we have a chance to compare the arguments that we are having here with what is happening in the real world in our constituencies, something that I tried to do over the weekend.
	Essentially, our debate has centred on when cuts will be made, which the shadow Business Secretary characterised a few moments ago. Should we make them now? The Government view, which I broadly support, is that the economy is rather too fragile for us to embark on cuts at this stage, whereas the Conservatives tend to argue that the cuts should be made more rapidly. That is the debate that we are having: right or wrong, there are arguments on both sides, but I find it very difficult to reconcile that debate with what is happening on the ground.
	When I left Parliament last Thursday, my first port of call was a mass meeting of teachers and lecturers at my local further education college. The problem is that 70 front-line staff have been told they will be sacked over the Easter recess, and they do not understand why. The college is a top-quality, academic establishment for post-16 year olds., and the staff have been told that the Government attach enormous importance to post-16 education. As far as I know, there is no fault with the college, but people have been told that there are going to be cuts. Those cuts are happening now, and people will get their redundancy notices in a few weeks.
	I thought that that may be some kind of strange outlier that was not typical, but I went to the local university the following day and it too is grappling with a completely new set of budget numbers that will almost certainly mean very substantial cuts in student numbers and teachers. Then on Monday morning I had an opportunity to go to the National Physical Laboratory, which happens to be in my constituency. It is one of the country's leading science centres, and it is where Greenwich mean time is based.
	I spoke to a staff union meeting there, and again it appears that Lord Mandelson's Department has decided that this very productive corner of British science must have cuts. The Government have suggested that it generates £25 of benefit for UK plc for every £1 that it spends, but 40 or 50 members of staff have been given redundancy notices already and others are to follow.
	This is what is actually happening, in the real world. We are talking theoretically about making cuts now or later, but the environment in which some sectors of the economy are operating is one in which cuts are being made already. Coming back from that contact with the real world, I had a fresh look at the Budget in a bid to understand what is going on.
	When we read the Budget, we think it appears to have absolutely no impact on the economy at all. We are talking about a change in revenue worth about £1.5 billion, or one tenth of 1 per cent. of the economy. The fiscal changes in the Budget therefore have absolutely no effect on the economy at all, but the report published at the end of last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that 2010-11, the next financial year, will see a very big fiscal contraction of about 2.5 per cent. of GDP. That is because the fiscal stimulus that the Government supplied is being withdrawn, and it is also due to the big cuts in capital spending.
	Again, back in the real world, I was reminded of what that actually means. I was invited to one of the big rooms at Twickenham rugby stadium to speak to a group of roofing contractors-500 of them. They had various experiences, and many of them had had a tough time in the recession. They told me that all their business plans are being affected by the fact that the Government are drastically reducing capital spending. This is happening and it is affecting their businesses. That, combined with the severe contraction of credit from the banks, means that many of those companies are finding it extremely difficult to operate. The artificial debate around the Budget has little connection with the real world in which those companies work.

Vincent Cable: No, the criticism is not of the fact that there needs to be a tightening of budgets. Of course there has to be, although we have taken a view, which I have communicated publicly with the hon. Gentleman's party leader, about the emphasis on protecting the Government budget for next year. However, if cuts are to happen, it is important that they should be done openly, not under the radar. My criticism of what is happening in the FE sector, universities and science laboratories is that it is all happening by stealth. There is no discussion whatever of priorities. It is happening through civil servants and quangos. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that cuts are occurring or of how they should occur. That is my central criticism of what is happening at the moment.
	On timing, the hon. Gentleman well knows-we have had this communication already-that we broadly support the Government's view that it would be better not to embark on large additional cuts in the budget in the coming financial year, because the economy is fragile and that would aggravate the recession, creating even more unemployment. Arguably, it would make the fiscal deficit even worse. That is our position.
	Let me talk about the negatives-the worries-in the Budget. The first is the almost hopelessly optimistic assumption about the rapid return to growth in 2011. There is now a long list of independent forecasters in British industry and in the City none of whom thinks it remotely likely that growth will approach the level that the Government assume. There is one exception, Goldman Sachs. The Bank of England is also at the upper end of the range, but the overwhelming majority of independent forecasters believe that the Government are far too optimistic.
	The second criticism is of how the Government intend to achieve some of the cuts when they come. We had the real Budget announced in press releases after the official statement in Parliament last Wednesday, in the form of these efficiency cuts. For the rest of the day, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond), the shadow Chief Secretary, and I had quite an amusing series of exchanges, ridiculing those cuts. Neither of us is normally noted for mirth-we are often compared to undertakers-but we found this very funny, because the efficiency cuts had obviously been cobbled together and written on the back of an envelope. They did not amount to much at all.
	That made me all the more surprised yesterday when I discovered that my opposite number, the shadow Chancellor, had adopted all these fictitious cuts-efficiency savings-and used them as the basis for promising to repeal the national insurance increase. These efficiency savings: if we can have them, they are great, but on the one hand to ridicule them and on the other to use them as the basis for promised tax cuts has no credibility whatever.
	For the record, this is the approach that we have adopted. We are by no means able to explain, any more than anyone else, the full extent to which the fiscal contraction could occur, but we have identified £15 billion gross of savings, which we think we could achieve. We specified them. They are not efficiency savings. Any efficiency savings are above that. We have allocated some of that figure, £5 billion, to job creation in the short term and other spending priorities in the longer term, including the pupil premium, which would provide additional funding for schools. We recognise that there will have to be-especially in 2011-12 and beyond-some serious spending reductions over and above what we have identified.

Vincent Cable: I gave no grovelling apology to the permanent secretary to the Treasury. I misrepresented nothing. I had a meeting with the permanent secretary to the Treasury, as indeed all Opposition Front-Bench spokesmen did. It was a perfectly routine meeting, and that was the way I represented it. If people chose to dramatise it in the context of discussion of hung Parliaments, I have to say that was wholly false. I have written no grovelling letter of apology. I have written him a friendly note, confirming what I had said and had not said, but no apology whatever was needed or has been given.

Edward Balls: May the confusion about tranches 1 and 2 of Eurofighter, and therefore the confusion about exactly what the level of spending and efficiency savings add up to, have been what the shadow Business Secretary had in mind when he said that one could pay for the reversal of the next increase only after the election? Is that the kind of confusion that the right hon. and learned Gentleman was trying to avoid, and was it wrong that he should be over-ruled by the shadow Chancellor?

Vincent Cable: I sent the permanent secretary to the Treasury a handwritten note. His conversation with me was private, and it was a private note. I can assure the hon. Gentleman on the record that no apology was sought or given or was necessary. I did not misrepresent the meeting. It was a routine meeting between Front-Bench spokesmen of both our two parties. That was all that was involved.
	My final point concerns the bank lending practices for which the Government have responsibility in the semi-nationalised banks. We get very excited in these debates about the Government's fiscal objectives, but these are tiny by comparison with the significance of the amount of bank lending to the corporate sector. The Government are talking about targets of roughly £90 billion of business lending. My question about this is: should we believe them? We have had these targets before. They were legally binding. They were not met. We in all parties have experiences of large numbers of small and medium-sized companies either being unable to obtain credit or being offered credit on terms that are so onerous they cannot take them up. I ask the Minister when he replies to give a much clearer explanation than he has been able to do so far about how these bank lending targets will be achieved next time when they were not achieved before.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I am not for one moment saying from the Chair that the situation today is in any way admirable. We have had an apology. The right hon. and learned Gentleman says that he does not want to make a meal of it, but we have now had three courses on this matter, and perhaps we should regard our appetite as fulfilled on this occasion. The Chief Secretary may feel moved to make further reference to it if he should catch my eye at a later point.
	With regard to the time limit on speeches, once again, as yesterday, Mr. Speaker and the Deputy Speakers have been wrong-footed by events in their calculation, so I give notice that the 15-minute limit that has been imposed by Mr. Speaker will have to be adjusted down at some later point. However, I will try to maintain it for as long as looks credible.

Ann Widdecombe: I am following my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) in that this will be my last speech in the House of Commons. Unlike him, I cannot claim a 40-year record-I have had a mere 23 years in this place-but I always imagined that when I was making my last speech and about to depart, I would be sad. Instead, I find that my uppermost sentiment is one of profound relief. I sincerely hope that future generations of Members of this House will be able to serve in an atmosphere free of the welter of public vituperation and vilification that this Parliament has been confronted with, and that there will once again be a recognition on the part of the public that the overwhelming majority of people who come here-on both sides of the House and in all parties-do so with some degree, and sometimes quite a lot, of sacrifice, in terms of either finance or family. My hope for the future is that some calmness and some respect will again prevail.
	Whereas my hon. Friend came here with a sense of history, I came here with a sense of the future. My maiden speech was on Trident. Of course, at that time, I was very much in favour of keeping Trident, and those on these Opposition Benches, which were then occupied by the Labour party, were very much opposed to that. I am delighted that they have seen the error of their ways, and that they now in fact see the merits of Trident. That gives me great hope. They also now see the merits of privatisation, so I am very hopeful that at some stage in the future, they will see sense on a great many other things as well, and that a far more sensible and down-to-earth approach will prevail among them.
	However, my main hope was that we would have a smaller state and a larger individual. My other main hopes, to which I shall address the main body of my remarks-I took this for granted at the time, but now I do not-were that we would have a stable society, in which the family was the bedrock, respected and supported by Governments of whatever party, and that citizens could feel safe and live decently, regardless of the income that they had at their disposal, and regardless of where they were obliged to live in this country. I want to direct the rest of my remarks in this Budget debate to measures that I feel are still desperately needed, and that would go some way towards securing those objectives.
	I turn first of all to the family. If in our time there has been an assault on any great institution, it has been not on the House of Commons, but on the family. I am talking about the record levels of family break-up and the record numbers of young children who are growing up in houses where the parents have split, who are expected to split their time, emotions and whereabouts between those parents. But for all the many families like that, there are plenty of other parents who stay together in a committed and subsisting marriage, and who wish to bring their children up in a stable environment. I therefore wish to draw particular attention to the plight-and it is a plight-of the non-working mother.
	When a family decides that upon the birth of the first child, the mother-it may sometimes be the father, but statistically it is usually the mother-will stay at home to herself take on the full-time duty of bringing up that child, they are faced with a situation in which they move, almost overnight, from being two people living on two incomes, to being three people living on one income. Where that family is well off, that is not such a big issue, but for the majority of families that model, which many would like to follow, is now but a distant aspiration. There are many reasons for that, and it has not been helped by the prevailing social view that somehow there is something intrinsically second class about the woman who opts voluntarily to stay at home and bring up her children.
	While I have been in this place, I am pleased to say that I have lost three secretaries to full-time motherhood-I am not pleased that I lost them, but pleased for the reason that I lost them. The most recent said to me that she spends all her time trying to justify to her friends and contemporaries why she had chosen not to come back to work when the child was born.
	The social attitudes do not help, but there are also massive financial considerations. As a result of property prices and the huge mortgages that are necessary, it is simply impossible in many families for one of the parents to say that they will stop earning. Therefore, every shred of help that we can give to such families should be given by the Government of the day. It is especially iniquitous that there should be such a difference between the support given to a family where the mother has decided on full-time motherhood-which is the highest calling, because those mothers are bringing up the citizens of tomorrow-and to families where the parents have decided to carry on working. This example is given by Peter Saunders, professor of sociology, who points out that
	"if both parents go out to work and put their children into childcare, the government gives them each a £6,035 tax-free allowance, as well as heavily subsidising their child care costs. But if they prefer to look after their children themselves, sacrificing one income and foregoing all the child care subsidies, the government penalises them by making the stay-at-home parent forfeit her (or his) right to a tax-free income."
	That is one of the most scandalous inequalities that we have.
	We not only fail to support the non-working wife, but we positively pour support on those people who are existing on two rather than one incomes. Much of that inequality stems from the decline in the respect for marriage that we used to take for granted in our society. That is one of the groups of people about whom I wished to talk about today-the non-working mother. I see nothing in this Budget to help the non-working mother, but I see much in some of the Conservative proposals that might help the non-working mother if they are fully implemented. In any case, the Government are wrong to have ignored this problem, and in the wind-up I would like to hear what the Government will do-in the limited time available to them-to give some support to the non-working, stay-at-home, full-time mother.
	The other group are those about whom I have spoken in this House before, and whom I have always called the forgotten decents. These are the law-abiding decent citizens, often but not always families-perhaps pensioners, a couple whose family has grown up and gone or single persons-who, because of a lack of resources, cannot escape from the environment in which they are trapped. I refer particularly, but not exclusively, to those big inner-city council estates where people have no aspiration but living a normal, unmolested life. That does not seem to be a ridiculous aspiration for a British citizen. But those people often do not dare even to leave their houses or flats after dark-not only after 8 or 9 pm, but even 6 or 7 pm-because they would be subjected to intimidation, robbery and thuggery. They live with that prevailing fear.
	Mothers who live on such estates have told me, and continue to tell me, as nothing much appears to have changed, that before they let their children out to play-which should be a normal activity-they have to check the surrounding area for needles. It is in those areas where the law-abiding live behind bars, because they fortify their homes like Fort Knox. There is wanton vandalism on those big estates and I vividly remember talking to one person who was disabled and had therefore no choice but to live on the ground floor. He could not live any higher: he had to occupy the ground floor. He had a pathetic, small patch in front of his flat where he had put pot plants to try to make a pleasant area in which to sit out in his wheelchair. Is that such a big aspiration? But his garden was regularly vandalised and finally every last plant was destroyed when some yob threw acid all over them.
	Are those areas policed? Is there a regular police presence on which those ordinary and modest British citizens can call? The answer is no. The regular plaint goes up, "We rarely"-they do not say never, because that would be an exaggeration-"see a policeman." There is no visible deterrent walking around these streets in the form of someone who could be called on by those who feel afraid. Money spent on policing those areas or bringing any other sort of hope to those areas would be money well spent. I do not see much encouragement for those people-the forgotten decents-in this Budget. I hope that I am wrong. I hope that in the wind-up, the Minister will be able to point to measures that have been taken, but I have deliberately chosen in this, my last speech, just two groups of ordinary, decent people-full-time mothers who just want to be able to afford to bring their kids up and not feel compelled to go out to work, and those who live in terrible areas and cannot get out of them, where every agency shrugs and they are abandoned by those whose job it is to look after them. Ultimately, that job is the Government's.

Frank Dobson: Subject to the views of the electorate of Holborn and St. Pancras, it is not my intention not to be here after the general election, but I wish to pay tribute to the two veteran Members whom we have just heard. However, I will not attempt to follow them because I welcome the Budget statement and the Government's and the Chancellor's refusal to listen to the siren voices who demand cuts before the recovery from the recession is well under way. My view is that we will need to be fairly careful about cuts in public spending and public investment even when the recovery is well under way. The definition of a recession, in many ways, is that the economy is working below its maximum, and the best way to deal with deficits, debts and practically every imaginable problem is to get that economy back to working at its maximum as soon as possible. Slashing investment stifles growth; it does not encourage it.
	I was not surprised-but it was saddening-to hear the shadow Business Secretary harking back to the days of Mrs. Thatcher, on the basis that, if it is not hurting, it is not working. He gave the impression that her policies of slashing public services promoted economic growth, but nothing could be further from the truth. Average annual economic growth under Mrs. Thatcher was lower than the average under the preceding Wilson and Callaghan Governments. Things went down, not up, as a result of those policies. We also had massive inflation during that time. The lowest inflation under Mrs. Thatcher in a year was 3.4 per cent., and it averaged 7 per cent. It was all kept afloat with takings from the North sea and privatisation, and that money was squandered: it was not invested in industry-there was not a British sovereign investment fund-research or training. However, some of the decisions that the Chancellor has made in the Budget mean that there will be investment in industry, research and even more in training.
	We must remember that the biggest beneficiaries of the economic policies of the Thatcher Government were the finance industry and the speculators-the speculators who have been ruining the world economy for donkey's years now, whipping up and down the world price of oil and gas. There can be no rational justification for the price of a barrel of oil falling from $140 to $80 in the space of a fortnight-that is speculation and nothing else. There was also speculation in the price of wheat and rice. When I was in Bangladesh, I asked a rice farmer whether the price he was paid for his rice had quadrupled in the previous year, but he had not seen a penny of that. Price changes took place partly on the American markets. There are also the speculators in currencies.
	The changes and relaxations introduced under Mrs. Thatcher contributed to-I do not say that they brought it about-the banking crisis, and the banking crisis has undoubtedly caused most of the deficit, directly as a result of the taxpayer having to provide bail-out funds to some of the banks that were going broke and to give guarantees to others to prevent them from going broke. The banking crisis has indirectly caused the recession, and the recession has caused the fall in output and tax take and led to more benefits being paid out. We do not need to stop investing; we need more investment to counter the downturn and to get back to maximising output. When someone loses their job, we all lose out: we lose the goods or services that they were producing, the tax that they would have paid had they been employed and then there are the benefits that we have to pay out to keep them and their families going. As I understand it, it averages at least £12,000 a year to keep someone out of work-so keeping people out of work adds to the deficit.
	The Government's measures have been working. The jobless total is fewer than the wiseacres were predicting; the number of houses repossessed is lower than the level predicted by the wiseacres in the City; and there has been an element of recovery. It has to be said that Britain has led the way. I know it is a commonplace to mock the Prime Minister, but I put more faith in the words of Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel prize for economics for his study of recessions and knows what he is talking about. In response to what the Prime Minister did in the year running up to the G20 summit in London, Krugman said that the Prime Minister had acted with "stunning speed", and had
	"defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up",
	and that he and the Chancellor had displayed a
	"combination of clarity and decisiveness"
	that had not
	"been matched by any other Western government".
	So when some trivial tripehound from the City comes on the "Today" programme or one of the other BBC or ITV programmes, I would stick with Krugman.
	The Government should not be pushed off course by economists led, for instance, by Howard Davies of the London School of Economics. When the Government nationalised Northern Rock, he gave us the benefit of his view that it would undermine the reputation and standing of the City of London in the eyes of the finance industries in other parts of the world. Get real, Howard! The City and Wall street have been hoist by their own petard. What they were doing has blown up in their faces.
	Let us consider Lehman Brothers whose auditor was Ernst and Young. Then we are faced with the output of the Ernst and Young ITEM Club, and we are expected to take notice of its predictions and are told that we need to recognise what wonderful people they are. Well, Ernst and Young were an item with Lehman Brothers in the other sense-they formed a couple that could not have been closer as they covered up for one another. And they, of course, were assisted by the noble Linklaters, the City solicitors, which actually provided cover here-cover that even some of the dodgy lawyers on Wall street had refused to give-for what Lehman Brothers was doing worldwide.
	These bankers, their auditors and the ratings agencies caused the banking crisis, and these self-same people are now demanding cuts in investment, while insisting that their bonus culture continue. Bankers apparently need mega-pay and bonuses to compete internationally, but everybody else has to take lower pay and worse working terms and conditions to compete globally. Who are these bankers and auditors and what is their track record? I have checked. Next time someone from KPMG gives us advice on finance, remember that it was supposed to be HBOS's and Bradford & Bingley's auditor. Next time Deloitte sends someone to give advice, remember that it was the auditor for the Royal Bank of Scotland-and a cracking good job it did! PricewaterhouseCoopers was the auditor of Northern Rock, and I have already mentioned Ernst and Young, which allegedly was the auditor of Lehman Brothers.
	Let us consider the banks themselves. The shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in a previous debate, quoted the wisdom of somebody from the City Group, but it lost $55 billion. It bought up-or got into bed with-Merrill Lynch, which lost $51 billion. We might get someone from UBS telling us what we ought to be doing about our public services, but it only lost $44 billion. HSBC lost $27 billion; the Royal Bank of Scotland lost $15 billion; and Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan both lost $14 billion, yet we are expected to take notice of them.
	Then there are the ratings agencies. They gave triple-A ratings to all the rubbish that brought the international banking system to its knees, and now we have got to listen to them. Are they seriously saying that they believe that a United Kingdom Government would default on their borrowing? If they are not saying that, there is no reason at all why the British Government should have any difficulty getting their bonds on to the market. We have got to take an altogether more rigorous approach. We have got to reach a situation in which the banking industry is working for the rest of us. We can no longer continue with a situation in which the rest of us are working for the worldwide banking industry. We need a yet more radical response than we have had. We have got to end the fail-safe arrangements for the dodgy dealers. There should be no more bailing out of the people who got us into this mess.
	I am genuinely fearful that unless we do something about the problem, the democratic institutions that we subscribe to will be in danger. If the people think that their elected representatives cannot protect them from what is happening in this world, while another group of people are still being paid multiples of millions of pounds in bonuses, I do not think that they will tolerate it. They will turn their attentions to those who say, "We can do away with this." If I were running the British National party, I would be delighted with the present situation, with bankers lining their pockets and handbags, and teachers, nurses and firefighters being told that their meagre pensions pose a problem for the economy. Those teachers, nurses, firefighters and others did not get it wrong, but they are being expected to pay the price. The bankers undoubtedly did get it wrong. They are not going to have to pay the price; they are claiming the right still to be paid bonuses. Such a society will not be easy to sustain. Indeed, I think that there will be a threat to our democracy and to this institution unless we do something to change the balance and provide greater protection to ordinary people against the people who speculated us into the mess that we are in now.
	I welcome the Budget and the fact that we have not fallen for the silly idea of cutting investment before the recovery is well under way. However, we shall have to be careful about making cuts even when the recovery is well under way. We need the economy working at maximum output. That is the best way to deal with the deficit, debt and nearly every other problem that this country is afflicted with.

Michael Meacher: This has been an evening of memorable valedictory speeches, so I do not think we should let this moment pass without paying tribute to two Members-the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) and the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe)-who are leaving. However often and however much I have disagreed with them, I have always regarded them both as great parliamentarians who have spoken with sincerity and integrity and, as illustrated here again tonight, with a sense of values and principles in which they passionately believe. I believe that they have set an example to all of us. I also agree with what they both said about the need for a new Parliament after the election that is very different from this quarrelsome and vituperative one that we have had-one that can earn the respect of the electorate because we represent the democratic centrality of Parliament. I think that both those Members will be greatly missed.
	I will be brief-I will probably not use my 15 minutes-and I want to concentrate on the general structure and strategy of the Budget. I begin by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Chancellor on, once again, showing how adept he is at playing a difficult hand well. He has navigated a sensitive balance between preventing a double-dip recession, not endangering the recovery, keeping the financial markets on side and at least beginning to reverse some of the more grotesque inequalities that, in my view, so badly mar the face of Britain today.
	Having said that, I remain concerned about the proposed strategy for reducing the deficit, particularly the relative weight allotted to higher taxes, public spending cuts and higher economic growth in achieving that objective. The Treasury has proposed tax increases of £19 billion and public spending cuts of £38 billion. If the deficit of £167 billion is to be halved within four years-reducing it to £83 billion-that must mean economic growth yielding something in the order of £26 billion.
	I think that the first of those objectives on tax is readily achievable. At last it is being accepted that the burden of tax should rest much more on the shoulders of those who have made disproportionately huge gains in the last decade or two, not least on the shoulders of those responsible for the slump in the first place. The 50 per cent. top tax rate, the bonus tax on bankers, the loss of personal allowances, the freezing of inheritance thresholds and the mansion stamp duty tax will not have any effect on roughly 95 per cent. of the population. In fact, they will very largely be directed at the super-rich 1 per cent.
	Frankly, I think it absurd for the Tory press to scream as they have over this last week that this is an attack on hard-working middle and high earners. Who do they think middle Britain actually is? The medium income in Britain today is £22,000, while one third of the population subsists on less than £15,000 a year-a fact that we in this Chamber ought never to forget. The term "middle Britain" roughly applies to those earning between £15,000 and £30,000 a year, whereas the Budget increases will affect hardly anyone earning less than £70,000 a year. This is not spite; it is, at last, the beginnings of a switch back to some semblance of fairness. For that, I praise my right hon. Friend the Chancellor.

Michael Meacher: Of course I take the hon. Gentleman's point. There is a significant structural deficit as well as the cyclical deficit. Whichever form of deficit we are considering, however, what the market wants is not the cutting of the deficit per se, but the prospect of the economy's being pushed strongly towards a course of growth that will reduce the deficit more quickly and more effectively than any other measure.
	I think that the role of the public sector is important in that context, especially given the depth of the recession. I do not say this to be aggravating, but it is factually clear that the private sector will never be prepared to make the first move without the support of-indeed, a strong, vigorous lead from-the public sector. I believe that the one serious omission from the Budget is the omission of any systematic action by Government to promote public sector jobs programmes in certain sectors. The decline in house building has been greater than any in the last 80 years-1.8 million households, 12,000 of them in my constituency, are stranded on the waiting list-and there has also been a decline in infrastructure improvement. We are talking not about "make work" jobs, but about jobs that are desperately needed in our society at present. I believe that there is broad agreement on the need to drive forward the new green, digital economy. That must be done if we are to reduce unemployment by 1 million in two years, thus swinging the economy out of budget-dependent joblessness into job-providing growth yielding higher revenues for the Treasury in the form of income tax, national insurance and VAT.
	Let me give credit where it is due: the Government have moved a considerable distance from the market triumphalism of the last three decades. Sadly, however, they are still stuck in Thatcher market mode, in which it is only considered appropriate for the private sector to take the lead. That is an absurd economic prejudice and, in my view, a serious mistake which this Government, once re-elected, should rapidly correct-thus giving a much better grounding to what could otherwise be described as a Budget that has been skilfully balanced in unprecedentedly difficult circumstances.

Alex Salmond: It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher). As he probably knows, I would always have voted for him in internal Labour party elections if only I had had a vote in those contests. I agree with much of what he said, and I shall return to it shortly.
	I have been taking part in Budget debates in this Chamber for 23 years. I know that that is a mere smidgen of time compared to the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), but it is a fair spell none the less. I warmly congratulate the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not on the direction of his Budget and still less on its content but certainly on its timing. He is one of the few Chancellors in recent times-over those 23 years-who have resisted the temptation to hold Budgets in the middle of the Cheltenham National Hunt festival. For that, and that alone, I am profoundly grateful, together with many other people in the country, and in that spirit of generosity I warmly congratulate him.
	I said that I had participated in 23 Budget debates, but that is not entirely true. During the first, I was unfortunately and, of course, entirely unjustly suspended from the Chamber by a narrow vote of 354 to 19. It was, obviously, a close-run thing. Any of the 354 who are present now-certainly the hon. Member for South Staffordshire-will recognise the error of their ways. Checking the record today, however, I noted that one of the 19 was the Minister for Children, Young People and Families, the right hon. Member for Bristol, South (Dawn Primarolo). I do not forget these things. Let me assure the right hon. Lady that if-perish the thought-the Portillo effect were to overcome her in the coming election, a warm ministerial welcome would await her north of the border. However, I am sure that no such unfortunate circumstance will befall her in the coming campaign.
	The Chief Secretary to the Treasury was unfortunate to miss the start of the debate today. Had he been present, he would have been treated to a fascinating vignette featuring the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families-the next Chancellor but one-and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), the shadow Business Secretary, who were discussing whether the cuts proposed by the Government would indeed be deeper and tougher than those made by Margaret Thatcher. I do not think there is much doubt about the Chancellor's view. I have consulted Nick Robinson's Newslog, which has clearly overtaken  Hansard as the main record of such matters. Last Thursday's edition reads as follows:
	"I asked Alistair Darling to spell out how tough spending cuts could be:
	Robinson: 'The Treasury's own figures suggest deeper, tougher than Thatcher's-do you accept that?'
	Darling: 'They will be deeper and tougher'."
	As far as the Chancellor was concerned, that seemed to be a pretty direct answer to a direct question, but as far as the Secretary of State was concerned earlier in today's debate, that was not the position as he understood it-initially, I thought, just for his Department, but it then emerged that, as he understood it, it was not the position for the entire Government. We went through a range of possible explanations, one of which was incredible. The Schools Secretary actually suggested that Margaret Thatcher had not been engaged in cutting education funding in real terms. I think he should tell Baron Hattersley, who on 12 July 1988 said that the then Prime Minister was planning "massive cuts" in education spending. Clearly, however, the passing of time has altered the Schools Secretary's memory of such occasions. Perhaps he was not advising Baron Hattersley at that particular time.

Tim Boswell: First, may I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase)? I have always found him to be authentic and tremendous voice for the manufacturing industry-a great tribute and honour to the House. In making my own concluding remarks, I also want to mention my great affection and respect for my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), who made distinguished contributions, as did the leader of the Scottish Nationalists here, the right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond).
	This has been a rather good debate, which has been enjoyable to listen to. There is not much time left, but I must say that I am struck by the way in which a career can cycle around and come back to where it was. In July 1966, I joined the Conservative research department as a very young economist. The day after, one G. Brown, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, had confided in the House, and I paraphrase, "We are running the economy in a way that no economy has ever been run before." Now, one could find that another G. Brown and his Chancellor are running the economy in very much the same way as the first G. Brown did 44 years ago.
	At some time, we all have to get around to clearing out our offices, and I am doing that. Today, I came across the transcript of the Committee stage of the Bank of England Act 1998, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) has also mentioned. In that Committee, we discussed the independence of the Bank of England and the restructuring of the regulatory system. On 4 December 1997, I moved a series of amendments that were intended to test the strength and integrity of the Government's tripartite financial regulatory system, and we were told that it was all down to a memorandum of understanding. All I will say now-with hindsight, I readily admit-is that things went wrong not just in Britain, but internationally, and beyond our worst fears. They have triggered a massive recession and have paved the way for what I would describe as a hiatus of a Budget, because everyone is too frightened to move, at least on the Government side. They have left us all in the waiting room. We are waiting for some very unpleasant fiscal surgery, further particulars of which will be afforded at a later stage.
	On the balance of judgment, I have found it interesting that the voices from the left-we heard two together-and from the Scottish Nationalists have gone for the public spending solution. I do not believe that is plausible, but we have to find a balance, and I do not want my position to be caricatured at this late stage as saying that we want a kind of fiscal masochism of any kind. We need to tune things very carefully, but we need to bring the private sector with us, but the fear of further tax increases is the best way of killing any recovery.
	Let me make two brief points that are more or less tax-related, and then three wider points. I regret that the Government have done nothing to abort the proposals to increase national insurance contributions or to reverse their proposals to truncate the personal allowances and superannuation deductions for higher earners. In that alone, they have aggravated a problem that has long troubled me, because they have imposed further arbitrary fits and starts in what should be a reasonably progressive-I hope moderately progressive-tax system.
	Just as there are ridiculous marginal rates with benefit withdrawals, we now have in the tax system-wilfully-hurdles, dips and troughs. Spikes of marginal rate that are highly anomalous create deterrence. That is perhaps best seen, and most relevantly to the Budget, in the classic slab system that still applies to stamp duty. How many transactions for houses are done at £250,001, or at £1,000,001? The answer is very few, and that of course creates marginal rates on the order of thousands of per cent., because it is all or nothing when one goes over the limit.
	The second anomaly has to do with national insurance contributions. They have been built up by the Government as a second and politically more palatable form of income tax, but there are again major anomalies. For instance, one arises when a man reaches 65: I have worked out that the grossed-up value of no longer having to pay employee national contributions is almost as great as the value of the pension. We need to tackle anomalies like that if we are to provide rational, coherent and consistent incentives for people to stay on in the labour force. Given the possible abolition of the default retirement age, such an approach might even give employers some incentive to maintain people in employment after that age.
	I shall share my wider concerns briefly with the House. They may appear a bit diverse, but I think that there is a common underlying theme. My first concern is that we still say too little about effective productivity and competitiveness. That has been a bit depressing today, yet we are in a lethally competitive world. Alongside British car firms, Volvo has just gone to a Chinese buyer. On the financial side, it is interesting to note that the City of London Corporation commissioned an Asian consultancy to produce reports on global financial centres. The seventh and final report has just been published, and the research has been described as being
	"a wake-up call for policy makers that London's standing as a world-leading global financial centre should not be taken for granted."
	Add in continuing concerns about skills deficiencies and the declining productivity of the public sector, and we have a fight on our hands.
	If we are to fight that fight effectively, we must look to our social as well as our economic cohesion. Strangely, my upbringing took place on a co-operative farm. My father was a manager, and a Tory. I have stayed in the one-nation camp: I have not departed from that, and I have great sympathy with the renewed emphasis-it is not new-that my party is placing on social action and the voluntary sector.
	I believe that the new emphasis will soften the harshness that any Government would have to impose on our society, and that it will help tackle the frustration that we feel as we see more of our lives and income going to the state. The state proclaims itself to be beneficent, but it does not really provide the services that we feel that we should get, and we do not have ownership of the process.
	Most of us here can argue our way to getting our full share of the benefits of the public sector. However, I am always conscious of the people who, faced with that problem, come to see us in our surgeries because they are confused, demotivated and disempowered.
	We in this place have a duty to think together about how we can equip all our people with a good education as a basis for personal and social development, and with the right mix of skills. They must also have a reasonable progression in employment, and in their chance to take personal responsibility. That should include a share in public and local decision making, which in turn implies a more decentralised public sector. If we do not get that, we will remain stuck with a high deficit, and with national underachievement and despair.
	That brings me to my final point, which has to do with trust. The financial crisis was about a collapse in trust, and I shall always remember a cartoon that depicted a situation that I think that we have all seen. A person is about to a pay a filling station cashier. A queue is forming behind him, and the cashier says, "It's all right, sir. Your credit card's OK, but we're just making another call to check whether your bank is."
	No one believes in the banking system. In the same way, no one believes in us as politicians. I think that it is all related. Whatever we say, people immediately throw it back at us. The answer is that we all have to learn to be more accountable, which involves more than process, or form, or box ticking. If we in this place want to be trusted again to make decisions on behalf of society, we need to know-and make clear-who carries the can for failure.
	We cannot allow things to collapse through the middle, without anyone being responsible for what has happened. This recession has not been an act of God; it has been an act of man-a series of systemic failures. We need accountability at the highest level of state Government. We know that these have been difficult times, and government is never easy. Any Government would have been tested to destruction at the present time but, partly through their over-optimism, arrogance and rhetoric, we now find that this Labour Government have failed. I think that they will be held accountable for that very shortly.

Sammy Wilson: That brings me to my question for the Chief Secretary; I hope that we will get some answers when he replies to the debate. If the plans are there-if it is known what will happen to departmental expenditure levels-why is that information not being passed down so that proper plans can be made by Departments and, especially, devolved Administrations, and they can play their part in a constructive approach to the difficulties that face us as a nation? As the position develops-the plans that are in place may well change-why cannot information be continually fed to devolved Administrations so that they know how the situation is changing?
	Secondly, there are ways of protecting public services, one of which is a cap on public sector pay. I know that the Chancellor has indicated that he does not want to see pay increases of more than 1 per cent. However, we still have a bonus culture in the public sector. Ironically, Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom in which, despite the recommendations of the Senior Salaries Review Body, bonuses for senior civil servants were not implemented last year. That is in keeping with the approach that we need. Bonuses often take up a huge part of public sector pay and are a cause of public resentment, as well as queries as to why people are getting paid huge bonuses when Departments are not performing. It would be useful to hear the Chief Secretary's thoughts about ongoing public sector pay negotiations and whether a pay freeze would be a way of protecting, at least to some extent, the provision of public services.
	I do not believe that the current situation is still sustainable, and anyway, I am a natural philosopher and my view of life is that I would rather people have their own money to spend rather than have it taken off them in tax increases and spent by the public sector. There is a balance to be a struck and a need for certainty, and the importance of timing cannot be overestimated. We will gain in credibility as a Parliament only if we approach the financial difficulties in an honest way, as the hon. Member for Gainsborough said. We must lay out all our cards for the public. I listened to interviews on "Newsnight" the other night, and people were saying, "Do they think we're fools? We know that if we're spending more in our own houses we have to cut our spending, and we know you've got to do it for the nation."

Brooks Newmark: I first draw Members' attention to my ever-diminishing entry in the register of interests.
	I join others in paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) and my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) for their services not just to our party but to the House. I doubt that I will last as long as them in the House, and I have huge respect for all they have achieved. They are incredibly independent individuals who have followed their own paths and achieved great success here, and I wish them luck after they retire.
	In Budget after Budget when he was Chancellor, the Prime Minister consistently pledged, "No return to boom and bust". It was his defining mantra, but now we know that he did not abolish boom and bust, he simply fuelled it. Millions of families, pensioners and businesses are now paying the price for more than a decade of economic mismanagement and fiscal imprudence.
	The Budget that we are debating was the current Chancellor's chance to leave a better economic legacy for our country than his predecessor, the Prime Minister. It was a chance to present a credible plan, get the British economy moving again, support hard-working families, offer a new direction for public services, reverse the tax on jobs and offer equality of opportunity for all. Instead, we got a do-nothing Budget from a Government with nothing new to offer. The legacy of this Labour Government is clear: they have taken Britain right from boom through to bust. It is on that record of boom and bust that the Prime Minister will shortly be judged at the ballot box, and it is that record that I wish to examine a little today.
	I begin with the budget deficit. With due respect to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson), who is no longer in his place, he seems to live in a parallel universe. We are living with perhaps the worst budget deficit in the G7. We have a worse deficit than even Greece. In fact, I believe it is the worst in the developed world. For too many years, the Prime Minister has been effectively maxing out the nation's credit card, and his solution and that of the Chancellor in the Budget is to say, "Let's take out a new credit card."
	We are treading on dangerous ground, and in fact the Government have been chastised by both the European Commission and the Bank of England for their lack of clarity in dealing with the budget deficit. The financial markets have begun to punish their fiscal imprudence. I believe that in the credit default swaps market, McDonald's is rated higher than the British Government today.
	This Budget did nothing to allay anybody's concerns. Reducing projected borrowings by a projected paltry £11 billion provides no basis for rejoicing. Indeed, as we have heard, the Red Book shows that Government borrowing in 2009-10 is projected at £166 billion, which works out-I am sorry that the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) is not here to hear this-at £456 million a day, or £19 million an hour, or £317,000 a minute, or £5,280 a second. That is the legacy that this Government are leaving for us to clear up, hopefully, after 6 May.
	On public debt, the last Conservative Government bequeathed national debt of some £350 billion. Under the Prime Minister's stewardship and his ceaseless moving of the goalposts of his now discredited golden rules, debt is forecast to reach some £777 billion this year. That means that each and every person will owe a liability of an extra £23,000 by 2014. As debt has increased, so has the cost of servicing it. We read in the Red Book that the debt interest for 2010-11 will be £41.6 billion. As we are discussing education today, I should say that that is in fact bigger than the whole of the schools budget of £40.6 billion. However, that is not the whole story. The Minister may be familiar with my analysis of the true extent of Government debt. Counting liabilities that are hidden off the balance sheet, debt now perhaps stands at a staggering £2.2 trillion. That includes public sector pension liabilities, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) alluded, which are almost £1 trillion, private finance initiatives and bank debt-we must count the debts of the banks that we have acquired.
	The Chancellor may be comfortable for debt to rocket to a predicted £1.4 trillion on-balance sheet in 2014-15, but that is more than 100 per cent. of gross domestic product, and we cannot keep our heads in the sand any longer. The hard decisions must be taken now, and we need mechanisms in place to prevent any future profligate Chancellors-of any party-from frittering away taxpayers' money. The Conservative party would establish an office of budget responsibility to provide an independent audit of all Government liabilities and to hold them to account for all their fiscal promises.
	This is all about transparency, and the Government have not been transparent with the public on the true extent of the nation's debt, among other things. A lack of transparency permeates every aspect of the Prime Minister's legacy of boom and bust, yet surely now more than ever, taxpayers deserve transparency. The Government have rightly demanded rigorous transparency from banks and companies, but they lose all credibility when they refuse to apply the same standards to themselves. It seems that few lessons have been learnt. In his Budget speech, the Chancellor failed to mention the stealth hikes that are hidden in the small print. He has frozen all personal allowances, effectively increasing taxes for 30 million hard-working individuals up and down the country.
	The Chancellor also promised details on spending cuts, but instead, we have a £20 million black hole where details of future spending should be. Departmental officials have even admitted that they know nothing of those details. For a Government claiming economic rectitude to have no spending plans beyond next year simply defies belief, and economic and financial credibility. We need to create transparency throughout government-both local and national.
	Savers are the economic bedrock of society, and those who prudently put away money during the good times in preparation for the hard times must be rewarded, yet that logic is entirely antithetical to our boom-and-bust Prime Minister. That is why household savings had dropped almost to zero when the recession hit. We are consistently one of the lowest-saving countries in the OECD. I was pleased with the doubling of the individual savings account limit in the Budget, but we need to go further to restore a savings culture. The path to prosperity depends on an economic model based on savings and investment, not consumer borrowing and Government debt.
	The poorest pay the highest taxes: the poorest 20 per cent. pay 39 per cent. in income tax while the richest 20 per cent. pay 35 per cent. Indeed, when the withdrawal of benefits is taken into account, low-paid earners have a marginal tax rate of some 96 per cent. Furthermore, child poverty has increased for the third year in a row. Today, some 4 million children live in poverty. Tony Blair's ambition of halving child poverty by 2010 has been left in tatters by this Prime Minister.
	As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has concluded, the strategy against child poverty and social exclusion pursued since the late 1990s is largely exhausted. Today, one in five young people cannot find a job. In my constituency alone, unemployment has trebled. Will the 1 per cent. increase in national insurance be an incentive for employers to hire more people? I suspect not, and we are right to propose abolishing it.
	The Prime Minister talked about the collapse in sterling. In 1992, when he was shadow Chancellor, the Prime Minister said that
	"a weak currency arises from a weak economy which in turn is the result of a weak Government".
	Never was a truer word spoken. We have heard about the sell-off of gold at prices four times below its level today, losing the Exchequer some £6 billion. The tax credits system has lost billions of pounds through incredible mismanagement, and the Public Accounts Committee has pointed out that
	"tax credits suffer from the highest rates of error and fraud in government".
	My constituents would certainly agree. Every week I, like many hon. Members, hear from families facing real hardship, uncertainty and stress at a time they can ill afford it. I am a firm supporter of tax credits, but the system needs urgent reform. For a start, the Government should have used this Budget to focus on tax credits for households with incomes less than £50,000.
	The dissection of the Prime Minister's blueprint from boom to bust could go on, but the message is clear. The very boom and bust that the Prime Minister hubristically claimed to have abolished will now be the epitaph of this Labour Government. The Chancellor said that this Budget would be about choices, and his choice was simple-generate the ideas and reform necessary to get Britain moving again, or end Labour's terms in office with a continuation of the Prime Minister's boom and bust politics. The Chancellor made the wrong choice. A Budget comprising back-of-the-envelope sums and delivered with one eye on the ballot box was not the Budget that Britain needed. We do not need more of this debt, waste, tax and irresponsibility. Short-sighted political positioning should never come above the economic interests of the nation. We need change, vigour and ideas to get our economy moving again. In a few weeks' time, I hope that that is exactly what we will have.

John Hayes: I have never been terribly interested in the present because "now" is an illusion, as it instantly becomes "then". I have always been most interested in the past, as it is the thing we can most readily alter through our memory. Unlike Keynes, however, I am interested in the future. Keynes said that in the long run we are all dead, but the long run counts. It counts particularly for those of us who have children. I have two young children and I care about what happens to them. I care about the debt they will face-both personally and as part of a country now facing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley) has just said, a mountain of debt.
	By their very nature, Budgets look to the future. They plan the economic future and particularly the next 12 months in economic terms. This was not really a Budget that looked to the long term; it looked no further ahead than about six weeks. It was an immensely short-term Budget and a political Budget-one that took not difficult strategic decisions but convenient tactical decisions, failing to meet the challenges we face.
	It is clear from the Budget that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister misunderstood the scale of the recession from the outset. They did not expect it to last longer than those experienced by their economic rivals. As we know, however, it has lasted six full financial quarters, longer than any recession in any other G7 country, and GDP has shrunk by 6.2 per cent. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Government borrowing as a share of GDP will be the highest in the G20 this year. What is the response from the Government? The Budget offers no credible path to a stronger economic future; all it offers are more hidden tax rises in the shape of frozen income tax thresholds and increased national insurance, which is a tax on jobs.
	The banking crisis and the recession that followed exposed fundamental problems for an economy that has become too dependent on a single sector. Two of the most profound macro-economic changes in my lifetime, both of them undesirable, have been the growth in the power of transnational corporations with no allegiance to any one nation and, indeed, no loyalty beyond their commercial interests, and the dependence of economies-bought by many liberal economists as desirable-on a limited number of economic providers, or sectors. That is what has happened to our financial services and banking. It is impossible to imagine the Government emerging from the present problem, given that they failed to recognise it and were, to an extent, responsible for it.
	Perhaps the most tragic outcome of those failed financial policies is the growing army of young people who are not in employment, education or training, and in the few minutes available to me I want to say a word about their plight. They are often presented in a fairly cold way-they are seen as an economic opportunity cost- but we are talking about up to a million young lives. We are talking about broken dreams and shattered hopes. We are talking about people who, because of their disengagement, are likely to be socially and culturally detached, and who, because of the declining number of unskilled jobs, are unlikely to find employment even in the medium and long term. If one's first experience of the job market is one of disappointment and detachment, that may have profound long-term implications.
	Even in the good times, the times of economic growth, the number of young people so affected was rising. That was a trend problem, and not a result of the recession. Nevertheless, it has been exacerbated by the recession, and we have a moral duty to do something about it. We have a duty to create new opportunities for those young people, and to provide them with the skills they will need to participate in an economy that will become increasingly highly skilled and high-tech. For Britain has no long-term future as a low-tech economy: we will not return to the days when we made template metal toys. We will survive and compete only as a high-tech, highly skilled nation. Those young people's opportunities lie in that vision, but no such vision is set out in the Budget. It contains no such ambition for the generation that I have described-that forgotten army of young people.
	In the couple of minutes left to me, let me propose an alternative. Let me give the House a taste of a different Britain. Let me allow the Chamber and the country to dare to dream again of something better. It is entirely possible for us to regenerate the prospects of that forgotten army by investing in skills. The House would expect me to say something about skills.
	I do not take the Chicago economist's view that all that matters is flexibility in economies or, indeed, in labour markets. I was interested by one or two of the speeches made by members of other parties in that regard. I believe that investment in skills pays dividends beyond the obvious, and that it has a variety of social and cultural as well as economic effects. I believe that it gives people a sense of pride and purpose, and builds a cohesive society.
	We need to boost the number of apprenticeships massively by transferring large amounts of money from the Government's failed Train to Gain programme, with its immense deadweight cost, to the apprenticeship budget. We must do that by designing new apprenticeship frameworks, by making it easier for small companies to participate, and by changing both the prospects of people and our economic prospects. We could have seen that in the Budget, but we did not. We will see it in a Conservative Budget, run by a very difficult Administration who will bring new hope to those people and to the whole of our country.

Philip Hammond: We have heard some excellent speeches this evening. This has also been a poignant debate, with six valedictories. They were delivered by the hon. Members for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase) and for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay); by my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack); by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), whom I had the privilege of serving under when she was shadow Secretary of State for Health; by my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), who led for the Opposition on the first Standing Committee on which I had the pleasure of serving in this place; and by the right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), who said, in referring to his own, that a Member's maiden speech is often the best speech that they make in this place. I suspect that that might not be the case for all Members, but it is probably beyond question that it is the best rehearsed speech any Member ever makes in this place. I pay tribute to all of the departing Members, and I am sure that I speak for all of us in wishing them well whatever they do in the future.
	The scale of the fiscal and economic challenge this country faces is unprecedented. The backdrop to the Budget is stark: unprecedented levels of public borrowing and structural imbalance in the public finances. Despite the prediction that we would "lead the world" out of recession, Britain was the last G20 country to emerge from a recession that was the longest and deepest on record. We still have the biggest Budget deficit in the G20 and one of the weakest economic recoveries. In February of this year alone, the Labour Government borrowed more than they will spend on police and immigration in the whole year. They are racking up debt at a rate of more than £300,000 a minute-a legacy to our children and our grandchildren that will take them a lifetime to pay off.
	Our credit rating is under threat; one in five young people in this country cannot find a job; child poverty is increasing; the banking system cannot finance the recovery in the small and medium-sized business sector; and national income per head is lower in real terms now than it was at the last general election. Therefore, what we needed last Wednesday was a big Budget: a Budget to match the scale of the challenges the country faces; a Budget for recovery; a Budget with the vision and the toughness to tackle the challenges we face, not duck them. This Budget was Labour's last chance to bid for fiscal credibility, and they blew it.
	For the Chancellor personally, it was the last opportunity to secure his legacy, but he chose partisanship over statesmanship. What did he give us? He gave us a Budget whose good news announcement was that we are borrowing "only" £167 billion this year and £163 billion next year; a Budget whose only big ideas-the stamp duty cut for first-time buyers, the green investment bank and new university places-were stolen from the Conservatives; an empty, cynical, pre-election Budget, lacking in energy, lacking in vision, lacking in new ideas to get the economy moving again. It shows no sign of the Government's having grasped the scale of the mess they have got us into.
	It is therefore unsurprising that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said it was "not so much a Budget as a holding statement." A City commentator described it as
	"a do-nothing Budget that had shades of Nero about it".
	It contains nothing to deal with the legacy of Labour's debt, nothing to put this country back on the path to sustainable prosperity-instead, just more delay, dissembling and ducking of the tough decisions.
	Perhaps we should not be too surprised when we look at the track record of this Government and this Prime Minister: the man who ended boom and bust; the man who doubled the tax rate for the poor and destroyed social mobility in this country; the financial genius who sold the nation's gold reserves at a quarter of what they are now worth; the visionary who raided our pension funds and destroyed a pension system that was once the envy of Europe; who has doubled our national debt and set it on course to double again; who has made an art form of deferring the bad news; and who has made every decision since this crisis began on the basis not of what is good for Britain's economy, but of what will conceal the scale of his failure until after a general election. His credibility is destroyed. Just a few months ago, he was still peddling the line, "Labour investment versus Tory cuts", but now his own Chancellor says that the cuts will be deeper and tougher than Margaret Thatcher's.
	What did we get from the Chancellor in the Budget statement on his planned spending cuts? We got about 30 seconds in a 58-minute speech, with the real announcement sneaked out later in the afternoon in a series of press releases that were meaningless in their content and bogus in their precision. I am thinking of the £343 million-not £340 million-of savings identified in the Ministry of Justice over the next three years and the £194 million saving to be made in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Those are meaningless and bogus because the Prime Minister has refused to allow his Chancellor to publish a spending review for the next three years. A departmental saving is meaningless if we do not know what the departmental budget is to start with.
	Cabinet Ministers, including the Schools Secretary, have been tripping over themselves to claim that they have to cut only X hundred million or Y hundred million pounds from their budgets. The truth is that they do not know how much they will have to cut, because they do not know what their budgets will be as the Chancellor has not told them and he has not told the electorate. He has not told the electorate for a reason, which is that he does not want them to know because he does not want a real debate on spending priorities.

Liam Byrne: I am grateful for your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	I was about start on a note of consensus, by agreeing with the shadow Chief Secretary that we have had four days of full and frank debate about the Budget. I should like to begin my words of congratulation with a tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (John McFall). He is not in his place at the moment, but he has made a significant contribution, just as he has contributed to economic debates in this House over the last 22 years-and not least during the eight years in which has chaired the Treasury Committee.
	My right hon. Friend outlined the importance of the Budget's measures to support small business, and he endorsed the view that to end Government support for small business now would be nothing short of inviting disaster. I know that all Members of the House will join me in wishing him a long and enjoyable retirement.
	Over the course of these debates, some hon. Members have argued for a faster pace of deficit reduction. We heard contributions on that from the right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram), and from the hon. Members for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), for Stone (Mr. Cash) and for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood). We also heard this afternoon from the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), who was making his last contribution in this place, and he was echoed by the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell).Others, on the other hand, argued that the stimulus provided in the Budget was insufficient. That was the argument as set out by the right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) in his final contribution to debates in this House.
	Others, however, have welcomed this Budget for its help for manufacturing and business, and for its investment in their communities. My right hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn) and for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton), as well as the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross), my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) and the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson), echoed that point. This afternoon, my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) made the same point in his valedictory speech, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase).
	Others welcomed the Budget's investment in infrastructure such as Thameslink, which was the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt), while others welcomed the investment in schools, the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron). The hon. Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin) made a powerful argument in support of the cider industry, and this afternoon the hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley) flagged the impact on pubs.
	This morning, the Office for National Statistics confirmed that the British economy grew not by 0.1 per cent., or indeed 0.3 per cent., at the end of last year, but by 0.4 per cent., which is faster than Germany, Italy and across the European area. We must, of course, remain cautious, but it is fresh and welcome evidence that the action taken by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has worked.
	That action has kept unemployment in this country down. It is 2 per cent. lower than across Europe, and 2 per cent. lower than America. The Chancellor's action has worked to keep the rates of repossessions and business failures at half of what we saw in the 1990s. So the central argument set out in the Budget has to do with how we build on that action, lock in recovery over the months and years to come, and secure growth.
	That is why the Budget puts up public spending for the year ahead, rather than cut it. That is why it widens the help for business cash flow, and why we are taking sweeping measures to increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses. It is why we are extending the offer of a job to every young person out of work for six months, and why we are bringing together £4 billion of new investment in small businesses. It is why we are creating a £2 billion green investment bank, doubling entrepreneurs' relief to £2 million, and investing £250 million more in our transport infrastructure. We will not leave recovery to chance, and we will not leave the jobs of tomorrow to the vicissitudes of the market place.
	The Budget puts £2.5 billion towards supporting the jobs of the future-what a contrast to the Opposition! The Leader of the Opposition is fond of saying that his party's evolution is something of a journey. It would be a good aphorism for his economic policy, as it is a journey that has gone round in circles. Back in 2006, the shadow Chancellor said that stability and not tax cuts was his priority. In 2007, he dropped stability and said that tax cuts were all that mattered. Then he said that he would stick with our spending plans, and then that he would not. Then he said that he would prioritise the deficit, and now he is back to tax cuts.
	It was no surprise to hear the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) tell the BBC, "Of course there is no plan." He was not kidding. First he got it wrong on regulation, then on banks, then on saving jobs, and now he has got it wrong on helping business.
	The Tory plan to scrap investment allowances, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies, would
	"be at the expense of businesses that are investing heavily in the UK."
	The international tax adviser to General Electric said it was a "real own goal". The Engineering Employers Federation-a body not known for its slavish adherence to Labour party orthodoxy-has said that abolishing those allowances
	"would be a disaster. Any business would have to think twice about investing in the UK."
	Did that move the Conservative party? Of course not. As the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) said, ignoring GE and the EEF was the right thing to do because he would not be
	"seduced by the arguments of losers."
	With policy brains such as that at work, it is scarcely a surprise that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) has been manoeuvred in to help. As I was casually looking at my favourite new blog, order-order.com, I was surprised to read that at Tory central office the shadow Chancellor's desk is now listed as "George Osborne/Hotdesk". Are they trying to send him a message? May I comfort him with the news that we have strengthened protection for temporary workers?
	The truth is that Conservative Front Benchers are auditioning for the same job without a script. That is the only explanation for why one day the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) says that Greece represents
	"the scale of the problem we could face",
	and the next, the shadow Chief Secretary says
	"nobody is suggesting that we are going to follow Greece".
	One day, the Leader of the Opposition says:
	"Of course there is a danger if you do too much too early, you could choke off demand."
	The next day, the shadow Chief Secretary says, "We've got to make a start in 2010." The IMF, the IFS, UBS, the CBI, two Nobel laureates and, greater still, the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) say that now is not the time to slam on the brakes, as do 186 members of the IMF. Only North Korea and Iran disagree.
	At the very least, may I ask the shadow Chancellor to listen to his own fiscal adviser, Sir Alan Budd, the former Treasury chief economist? He says:
	"If you go too quickly then there is a risk that the recovery will be snuffed out".
	Mr. Deputy Speaker, you know that you are in trouble when your own adviser starts repeating Labour's dividing lines.
	Alongside our plan to secure recovery and growth, the Chancellor set out our plan to halve the deficit. It is the most ambitious plan in the G7. The forecasts set out by the Chancellor show that debt over the next few years will be £100 billion lower than forecast. That means that borrowing will fall by £78 billion over the next four years: £19 billion will come from increased taxes and £38 billion from cuts in public spending, with the rest coming from a return to growth in the economy.
	Difficult decisions will be demanded of us, but we will approach that challenge determined to protect vital front-line services-in health, education and police numbers-while we bring borrowing down. Because we blunted the force of the recession, our tax receipts are better than expected. Borrowing this year is £11 billion lower, but our plan to halve the deficit will continue at the same pace.
	We have already announced tax increases that make up £19 billion in tax by 2013-14. In this Budget, we set out, Department by Department, £16 billion in cuts and efficiencies by 2012-13, on top of which will come £4.5 billion in savings by holding down public sector pay and reforming public sector pensions, as well as £300 million more in welfare reform savings.
	We do not salivate at the prospect of making those savings. We will do them carefully as we preserve our commitment to protecting front-line spending on the NHS, Sure Start, schools and police numbers. Conservative Members have attacked the clarity of the Budget, but the truth is that this week we have learned a lot about the plans of the Conservative party. Last week, the shadow Chief Secretary said to me that it was impossible to deliver £11 billion in efficiencies in two years' time. Yesterday, the shadow Chancellor said he could do it in two weeks' time. We are now being invited to believe that he can save £12 billion from Government budgets, although he cannot say which ones-not to pay down debt, but to pay for a tax cut.
	Even the shadow Chancellor has said that that will cost £5.6 billion, but the Treasury has now costed those increases in national insurance thresholds at £6 billion in 2011-12, £6.3 billion in 2012-13 and 2013-14, and £6.7 billion in 2014-15. Once again he has got his sums wrong. This policy is not a U-turn; it is more of a handbrake turn. Only the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe had the honesty to say that only in the Budget after the election will we know if the national insurance tax cut is affordable. This policy from a shadow Chancellor who told us
	"if you want to cut taxes you can't simply rely on more buoyant tax revenues, you can't simply rely on cutting red tape".
	The Conservative party now has something of the order of £34 billion of unfunded tax and spending commitments-and counting. Just to meet those promises alone, let alone cut the deficit faster, it will need new tax rises or deeper cuts to front-line public spending. It is a huge credibility gap, which, frankly, it cannot fill. Despite this spiralling loss of control, it persists with the argument that it can cut the deficit further and faster. But it will not say which Departments it will cut next year. It will not say what it will cut next year. It will not say when it will halve the deficit. It will not say how much further it will cut the structural deficit.
	The shadow Chief Secretary is fond of saying that he will take out the bulk of the structural deficit during the next Parliament. Labour's plans already take out two thirds. Why will not the Conservatives tell us what "bulk" means. What does it look like? How would we recognise it if we saw it? Why do they insist on it being a secret? Why is this bulk being hidden away from us? After all of these debates, we are none the wiser.
	The Chancellor's Budget set out an argument for fairness. This Budget was a Budget for the many, not the few. That is why the greatest burden will be carried by those with the broadest shoulders. In our deficit reduction plan, 60 per cent. of the £19 billion in new taxes that we need to secure will be paid for by the top 5 per cent. of earners. What a contrast to the Conservative party, which has said that it will cut child tax credits and child trust funds for families on modest incomes, all to pay for a £200,000 tax break for the 3,000 richest estates in Britain.
	Our Budget seeks to extend help where it is needed and to support aspiration, hard work and families. That is why, for those families seeking to buy their first home, the Budget includes a two-year stamp duty holiday for those first-time buyers of properties of up to £250,000 in value. It helps with targeted support for children. The new child tax credit of £4 a week will help families with children aged one and two from April 2012-a point made by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) earlier. It will extend extra help for Britain's 12 million pensioners, with a 2.5 per cent. increase in the basic state pension from April 2010, and extra help again for winter fuel payments.
	What a contrast that is to the policies of the Conservative party. It is not a party of change because it has not changed its party. Five years of rebranding cannot hide its attempt to destroy child tax credits. Just to save the £400 million, it needs to make its own sums add up. It would have to cut credits for people earning as little as £16,000 a year. Its plans to cut child trust funds would rip the heart out of the scheme, taking away a scheme that encourages parents and grandparents to save for a child's future-all to pay for a £200,000 tax cut for the 3,000 richest estates in Britain.
	The truth is, this was a policy authored by the shadow Chancellor. Some shadow Chancellors lack experience and some lack judgment, but this shadow Chancellor lacks both. The truth is that these debates have revealed the Tory party as risky, wrong and unfair. Find me the parent on a modest income who says, "Please scrap my child tax credit. Those 3,000 richest estates desperately need an inheritance tax cut." Our plan is for securing the recovery and renewing our country, and I commend the Budget to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That-
	(1) It is expedient to amend the law with respect to the National Debt and the public
	revenue and to make further provision in connection with finance.
	(2) This Resolution does not extend to the making of any amendment with respect to value added tax so
	as to provide-
	(a) for zero-rating or exempting a supply, acquisition or importation,
	(b) for refunding an amount of tax,
	(c) for any relief, other than a relief that-
	(i) so far as it is applicable to goods, applies to goods of every description, and
	(ii) so far as it is applicable to services, applies to services of every description.
	 The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Questions necessary to dispose of the motions made in the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Standing Order (No. 51(3)).

Dan Norris: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) on securing this debate on an area of my Department's work that is not widely known but in which I genuinely think we might take some pride.
	I had the great pleasure only a couple of weeks ago to open a conference adjacent to the Olympic site in Stratford to showcase the work of the aggregates levy sustainability fund. I do not think that anyone who was present on the day could fail to be impressed by the sheer diversity of the projects that have been funded. However, it cannot fund everything, and sometimes there are tough choices to be made by our delivery partners about how to use the funds allocated to them to pursue the broad themes that we have agreed for the fund.
	When the ALSF was introduced in April 2002, its overarching purpose was to complement the objectives of the levy that applies to the extraction of aggregates in this country, and to deliver environmental and social benefits to areas subject to the environmental costs of aggregates extraction. Since its introduction, the fund has been administered by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and delivered through a total of 28 delivery partners. Over the eight years since its inception, the fund has helped around 3,000 projects which have shared more than £169 million.
	A full public consultation was undertaken on how best to target funding for the current 2008 to 2011 spending review period. Based on those responses, we decided that the most effective way to achieve the fund's aim
	"to reduce the environmental footprint of aggregates production and deliver benefits in areas of extraction"
	was to organise work around five themes, and I should like to say something about them now.
	The first theme is the quarries theme. This includes Carbon Trust work with quarrying companies to reduce carbon emissions; Natural England work to enhance landscape and biodiversity around quarries; and English Heritage work to manage archaeology and other historic assets around quarries. It also involves working with the Mineral Industry Research Organisation to improve capacity for managing the environment in the longer term.
	The second theme is the marine theme. This involves increasing capacity for managing marine dredging and has included mapping most of the major extraction areas so that we have a better understanding of the environmental assets that need protecting. The third theme is resource use. This is work that the waste and resource action programme-often referred to as WRAP-and the Environment Agency do to ensure increased recycling of construction and demolition waste, and the sustainable use of materials to reduce the need for extraction in the first place.
	The fourth theme is transport. This comprises work that the Department for Transport does to train lorry drivers to drive in a more safe and fuel-efficient way, and to increase capacity to transport aggregates by rail and water rather than road. Another element is the work that British Waterways has done to enable transport of aggregates by the waterways around east London.
	Finally, there is the communities theme. This is work done by Action for Communities in Rural England and local authorities to fund projects in communities affected by extraction. Work ranges from improvements to community buildings to access to local services, and from the provision of play facilities to landscape improvements. To give an example from Nottinghamshire, a listed windmill at North Leverton that has been in operation for 200 years was in disrepair and under threat. An ALSF grant provided £16,000 towards work costing £32,000 that was needed to enable the repair and refurbishment of the windmill. The work allowed the mill to keep grinding, and to remain open to the public and for school visits. The fund's delivery partners develop the detailed criteria to determine, in a transparent way, how they select specific projects. In the case of local authorities, a share of the fund is distributed in the form of what is called an area based grant, through the local area agreement, to be spent according to locally set priorities.
	My hon. Friend is supporting a request from Misson parish council for some 2 km of new roadside footpath to be provided between the villages of Misson and Newington. However, through correspondence with Misson, Nottinghamshire county council has explained that the proposal does not fit with the criteria that it applies-criteria agreed with DEFRA-in using the funds that it disburses. The proposal would take a disproportionate amount of the funding available to the council and create a longer-term maintenance bill that has no obvious funder.
	Many key stakeholders have an interest in the ALSF. They range from the aggregates industry itself-which is understandably interested in getting some credit, given the contribution it makes to general taxation via the levy-to the waste management and processing sector, which is involved under the resource use theme by helping to reduce the need for virgin aggregates, and a vast range of non-governmental organisations, including national and local nature conservation bodies, and local archaeological and geological bodies.
	The Campaign for National Parks, Friends of the Peak District, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Wildlife Trusts have all benefited-significantly in the case of the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts-from ALSF project funding, and were therefore active contributors to the fund's outputs.
	The dedication and engagement of all those bodies, and indeed many others, in working with us on those issues is clearly apparent, and I applaud the work that they have done. The fund contributes in a small but very effective and important way to the objectives of a number of Departments and their agencies.